Amnesty International Case Study

Non-government organisations (NGO) are a diverse group of private organisations set up to engage in a wide variety of activities such as building schools, reporting on human rights, advocacy of the poor, climate change and disease prevention. NGOs are usually set up as charities or not for profit, meaning any profit they do make goes back into funding the services they provide. The number of NGOs is rapidly increasing and world wide there is an estimated 10 million NGOs. To give a bit of scale, in a country like India which has a population of 1.2 billion people there is approximately one NGO for every 400 people in the country. One of the most prominent and well known NGOs working across the globe is Amnesty International

Amnesty International, also known as Amnesty, started over 50 years ago when British lawyer Peter Benenson launched an appeal to highlight what he saw as a global trend of governments abusing their own citizens for simply holding opposing views or worshipping a faith considered undesirable ("How we started", 2016). Since that time Amnesty has grown into one of the largest and most well recognised NGOs on the planet with over 7 million members and can be found over 150 countries. They are a registered charity and are funded by donations from the public. Amnesty considers itself to be politically and

Therefore, the majority of their funding comes from membership fees and donations. Despite this, Amnesty International does take or receive donations from any government or government organisation ("Amnesty International", 2016). This allows Amnesty to maintain their integrity by remaining outside of any political or government influences. However, Amnesty has faced a lot of recent criticism over how they spend the money received and in particular, excessive executive payouts. Battling criticism is therefore another obstacle to